France scraps obsolete expansion plan for Paris airport

Travel slump caused by pandemic and greener policies forces change of direction

Expansion plans for Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport ihave been dropped in the wave of the Covid pandemic and a move to greener travel policies. Reuters

A plan for a major expansion of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport has been scrapped.

The French government cited climate goals and broader environmental concerns for dropping the €9 billion ($11 billion) plan, while the airport’s operator blamed the Covid-19 crisis.

The government asked operator Aeroports de Paris, in which it has a majority stake, to drop the "obsolete project that was no longer aligned with environmental policy", Ecological Transition Minister Barbara Pompili said in an interview published in Le Monde on Thursday.

"We will always need planes, but we must move towards a more reasonable use of air travel, and reach a reduction in the sector's greenhouse gas emissions," Ms Pompili said.

Charles de Gaulle airport, which opened in 1974, handled more than 76 million passengers in 2019, making it the second-busiest airport in Europe after London Heathrow.

The decision came  a week after a court ruled that the state had failed to take sufficient measures to halt climate change, a first in France.

The plan had already run into resistance from environmental activists and local politicians, as well as from the national environmental agency, which said it fell short in terms of climate protection.

The now defunct plan called for the construction of a fourth terminal by 2037 to boost the airport's capacity by 40 million passengers a year, or about 50 per cent, while creating 50,000 jobs, according to majority state-owned ADP.

ADP confirmed the project's cancellation, pledging to come up with an alternative strategy to transform Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports into "leaders in green aviation".

Airport expansions are in growing conflict with greenhouse emissions-cutting goals, often generating legal challenges. At the same time, the coronavirus travel slump buys policymakers more time to review capacity ambitions.

The UK Supreme Court recently overturned an earlier ruling against London Heathrow's planned third runway, but the project still faces administrative and legal hurdles.

The decision to end the project is "one of the consequences of the Covid-19 crisis", the ADP statement said.

A passenger cat Charles de Gaulle Airport, where expansion plan shave been dropped amid a fall in traveller numbers due to the Covid pandemic. EPA

A sharp fall in air passenger numbers because of Covid-19 restrictions worldwide recently prompted Transport Minister Jean-Baptiste Djebbari to say that boosting the airport's capacity now seemed like "an audacious bet".

Ms Pompili's announcement was welcomed by France's Green party, with its head Julien Bayou saying it was "a great victory for environmentalists" against what he called "an idiotic project".

He said, however, that the cancellation was "the least the government could do", saying France needed a more forward-looking policy to fight climate change than just "giving up projects".

Audrey Pulvar, a Socialist candidate for upcoming elections in the Paris region, said the government's decision was "logical and necessary", while rival leftist politician Clementine Autain said she worried about preserving jobs at the airport "during this terrible crisis" caused by Covid.

The head of France's employers' association Medef, Geoffroy Roux de Bezieux, said however that the outright cancellation of the expansion plans was premature.